Evgeny Morozov Quotes

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

There's a real contradiction that's difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.

The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.

Because of network neutrality rules, activists can turn to the Internet to bypass the discrimination of mainstream cable, broadcast, and print outlets as we organize for change.

I want to prevent us reifying 'the Internet' as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American Constitution as it was written.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.

Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their 'patriotism.'

If the U.N. were to be successful in its efforts to control the Internet, countries where human rights records range from questionable to criminal could be put in charge of determining what is and is not allowed to appear online.

I think the Internet and technology in general has changed everything. We can see it overseas even more with the Arab Spring and so forth.

Saving the Internet requires a greater sense of shared ownership and fewer bystanders accepting whatever today's Internet has to offer.

The Internet is a politically contested space.

One repressive state after another has had to face the dilemma of wanting abundant Internet for economic advancement, while ruing the ways in which its citizens can become empowered to express themselves fearlessly.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

To uphold state security China like many other countries of the world has placed some restrictions on the Internet to protect the freedom of the majority of the people.

We think of the Internet as a bottom-up phenomenon. There are people and countries that would like to treat it as a top-down institution; Americans resist that and I think rightfully so. It would cramp our style in terms of creativity, innovation, and so forth.

Today, the Chinese government blocks websites and search results with the so called Great Firewall, an army of censors deletes articles and comments deemed politically sensitive, and legions of government-sponsored Internet users steer online sentiment in the government’s favor by posting pro-Communist Party and nationalist comments in discussion forums.

Much of the civil rights work of this century will entail championing digital rights.

The argument about the need to regulate the digital space has to be weighed against freedom of expression in our society, whether we are interacting in a virtual world or in the real world where we have the growth of so-called 'safe spaces.'

When computers came online and people found out people weren't mixing there was uproar, and outed. But now that hasn't happened. People don't seem to care.

At a certain point, a critical mass of people either have used the Internet or have expectations. Anything less than the free flow of information will be seen as having something taken away. We've seen time and again - in Egypt and Iran, for example - that creates a backlash.

The Chinese government learnt how to manage the Internet from Western developed countries; we have not learnt enough yet.

There are a lot of Yahoo users who live in countries where their freedom of expression and freedom of association is not respected and where the government is trying to put malware on their computers to track them.

From the theft of confidential cables to 21st century protest movements, to development breakthroughs that have the potential to change millions of lives, we are all in uncharted territory.

There's a fundamental difference between people who want to see the Internet and say - 'Let's lobotomize and censor parts of it because we need to control it' - and those like us who see the Internet as a method of growing the economy and innovating in front of the world. And we have to actually reconcile those two positions. And we believe that it is much better to protect this crown jewel of civilization, which is the ability for us to communicate and express our ideas freely, than to try to lobotomize it.